It is a goal in the food processing industry to reduce the cost of handling of products during manufacturing and packaging. For example, flexible, generally planar food products such as tortillas are generally discharged from a processing machine (e.g., an oven, a cooling device, or the like) in a randomly spaced sequence, then hand counted, inspected and stacked. Manually counting, inspecting, and stacking the tortillas is a significant portion of the cost of the tortillas. Further, the risk of human error in manually counting, inspecting, sorting out all of the defective products, and stacking the products is high. Such human error may result in, for example, a stack of tortillas having defective products therein, a low product count, or improperly stacked tortillas that can result in damage to the product. Further, executing the handling and packaging processes of manually inspecting, sorting, counting, and stacking greatly limits the speed at which the product can be packaged. Similar difficulties are encountered when handling other generally planar, stackable items, such as paper plates.
It would be desirable to provide an apparatus and method that facilitates handling and stacking of such items.